The SaaS Playbook For Growth, Partnerships & Acquisitions

An exit sounds clean on paper. The reality is messier, more human, and way more useful. We’re joined by Brian Nolan, entrepreneur and investor, to unpack how he built Sellbrite by solving a real multichannel e-commerce problem early in the Amazon FBA wave, then sold the company to GoDaddy. Along the way, we get honest about what life looks like after the deal, why corporate pace can feel painful after startup speed, and how keeping fundraising modest can leave founders and employees with real ownership at exit. 

We also go deep on growth without a giant media budget. Brian breaks down how partner-led marketing actually works in B2B SaaS: earning trust with platforms, showing up at the right conferences, becoming a recommended integration, and doing the math on CAC, LTV, and payback periods. 

Then we follow the pivots: building BookOutdoors as a marketplace for campgrounds and outdoor accommodation, learning how hard it is to sell tech to operators who still run on phones and calendars, and finally buying a premium lifestyle apparel brand for dog people, Darren & Phillip. We talk US expansion from Australia, 3PL fulfilment, influencer strategy, brand repositioning, and the career advice Brian gives his daughter in the age of AI. 

More episodes on B2B SaaS available here on Hat Media

Transcript

Welcome And Brian’s Background

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome everybody to another episode of SAS Stories. Today I'm joined by Brian Nolan, entrepreneur, investor, optimist, uh, girl dad. I love that one. And then you're currently running a lifestyle apparel brand for dog people. However, you've got a rich history in the world of SAS, which is why I'm really excited to interview you today. Because we go, if we go as far back as 13 years ago, you founded a company called Cellbrite, which was acquired by GoDaddy. We then went into GoDaddy, and then you had a complete career pivot. So I want to know the story of all of that. I'm going to unpack all of that, but let's start with your origin story. So you

The Problem That Sparked Cellbrite

SPEAKER_00 0:45

founded Cellbright back in 2013. Um, what was the problem you were staring at that nobody else was solving at the time? What made you decide I'm going to start this company?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Sure. Well, first of all, Joe, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here and share the story. And hopefully, people learn something from my history. Um, yeah, my my career or my life has definitely been all over the place in terms of things that I've done. Um, I did not take the straight path anywhere. But Cellbright came about because just prior to Cellbright, I was actually working at an online retailer uh called CPO Commerce. And we were we sold power tools and things like that online. And my position there was to run all the channels except for our main website. So I was responsible for getting us on Amazon and eBay and Sears.com. So Sears, you know, department store here in the US, used to be, it's gone now, but big power tool seller, and so that was an important channel for us. So that was my role to manage all those uh marketplace channels, really. And at the time, there were a few old school SaaS solutions to help you manage all that, but they were really expensive. They took a portion of sales as part, you know, as the as the model, the business model, um, and just hard to use, kind of clunky. Started way back in like the eBay days for early eBay days. So uh we had software developers in the company, and I worked with them to build a solution for us custom to be able to manage all of our inventory across these channels and orders and have them all flow into our warehouse management system and so forth. So I really saw the need and the pain of having to do this and having to manage this. And this is in the very early days of Amazon FBA as well, fulfillment by Amazon. So um, I think maybe they had Amazon had five warehouses total in the in the US at the time. And uh they started doing fulfillment by Amazon, not just for your Amazon sales, but you could also use them for multi-channel fulfillment. So if I sold something on my website or on eBay, I can fulfill out of Amazon. So, and there was no software at the time, even the incumbents, that managed or helped automate any of that. And so that's where we saw the gap, and that's where we started actually. Because on the side, I had a little business as well selling Hawaiian print shirts and shoes and any kind of like excess inventory that I could get my hands on. I was selling it just on eBay and just on Amazon, and I was using Amazon to fulfill. So I was solving my own problem first of automating as much as I could so that I could have this little side business be as passive as possible and not touch it and not fulfill anything. So the original concept for Cell Bright was automating multi-channel film fulfillment between Amazon and eBay. We were selling these shirts and shoes and stuff on eBay. I wanted them fulfilled by Amazon, and I wanted the up inventory updated automatically. So that was the genesis of Cellbright. And from there, we had a bunch of customers and realized, you know, just listening to our customers, the other features and things that they wanted, and that turned into Cell Bright. So that turned into integrating with Shopify and Big Commerce and Magento, you know, the big e-commerce platforms, as well as other marketplaces and uh automating the whole thing. So that's how it got started.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Wow. I mean, yeah, you essentially saw a massive gap in the market, something that you could really benefit from, didn't exist. Let's build it. Um, which is how all the great stories begin, don't they?

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Now yeah, and it really is all about timing, right? Coming in when that Amazon FBA thing was happening at the very beginning and riding that wave as that was growing and being at the right place at the right time for that.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

I think timing is definitely a good one. It's um it's a lot harder to get the timing right in this day and age because there's there's so much out there, but but back then, absolutely.

Selling To GoDaddy And The Reality After

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Um now I feel like the the journey you went on with Cell Bright is almost every entrepreneur's dream because you built it from the ground up for about six years and then you sold it to GoDaddy in 2019, was it?

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Um, what did life look like on the other side after that deal? I think everyone's sort of dreaming about a big payout, and then I don't know, we we go on holidays or something like that. But usually the stories I hear are that you you it's sort of like when you lose your kids when they go off to college or you know leave the house, and you just kind of feel a bit like, oh no, what what am I doing now?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah, that's very true. I did take my first holiday after six years of of no time off, so that was nice. Well, and we so going back a little bit with Cellbrite, we um we didn't raise that much money, we didn't raise any venture capital. We raised some money from a tech incubator to start and some angel investors, so it was only about in total just under a million and a half dollars, um, which is a lot of money, but nothing compared to you know the money VCs are throwing around these days. Um, but what that did is left my co-founder and I and our employees with a lot of the stock. So when we got purchased, we all got, you know, we all did well. We all uh made some money on it. And a lot of times you hear stories about startups that raise so much money from investors that the founders and the employees are left, especially the founders, are left with very little, if anything, at the end of the day. So we were lucky to be able to do that. Moving to GoDaddy, they're a great company, and we had a couple other companies that were interested in in kind of in this bidding process with us. But we went with GoDaddy because we really liked the people. We had started working with them as a partner um about a year or so before, and so got to know them and we really like them and they treated us well. And um, you may be thinking, or people may be thinking, like, why would a domain company want to buy us? But they had started building all these SaaS products internally for when people buy a domain and they're just getting started with their business, they need to be able to build a website and do marketing and you know, all these different things. And part of it was this sell everywhere strategy. So we fit right into that e-commerce strategy. And the first year I spent two years there. The first year was pretty good because I was still managing my team and it felt very much the same. Year two was very different. A lot of my team moved on to different departments and different roles. I had new people under me beneath me. I was spending a lot of time just doing corporate y, like monthly business reviews, and it just did not have the same startup feel that I love and and you know wanted to keep doing. So it was no surprise to them because they acquire a lot of companies and the founders usually leave after a couple years because of that same thing. Um, so I I left after two years and started something new.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

I can totally relate to that. I've been very much immersed in enterprise, and then I went to startup, and the difference in environment, energy, just everything is wow, like just you know, night and day. Um so I completely appreciate you know having to go from one to the other. You're suddenly introduced probably to a lot of office politics and just you know delays in getting things approved, which can be quite frustrating from someone who's coming from startup.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

100%. That's what I tell people all the time when they ask what it was like. In my startup days, if we needed some other SaaS product for our own use, it would take you know five seconds. I would give the somebody a credit card and they'd go sign up. But at GoDaddy, and it and I think this is not just a GoDaddy thing, but in bigger corporations, there's all types of security, data security um analysis that has to be done and approvals from finance and all this stuff. It took you know three months to do something rather than five minutes. So those kinds of things, when you're used to startup world, are just painful.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah, absolutely. Now, coming back to Silverite, because you know, you you have to have gotten it to a point where it really looked appealing to someone like GoDaddy and all the others that were bidding on it. Curious,

Partner Led Growth Over Big Ad Spend

SPEAKER_00 9:31

how did you grow it? What marketing campaigns worked well, what business tactics worked well, um, even you know, the team that you employed at the time, what's the advice you can give us for that scaling journey?

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Um, yeah, we I mean we were a we were always a small team. I will say, you know, our we had a successful exit and it was meaningful. It wasn't a like a billion-dollar exit. We weren't a multi-hundred or thousand people company or anything like that. We were still very small. And so our revenue, while it was significant to us, was very insignificant to GoDaddy. You know, they're doing billions of dollars a year. Um, but the tech and the customers and everything were important, so that's what that's what it was about for them. Um in the early days, we, you know, most of the marketing was word of mouth, or we'd spent a lot of time working closely with our partners that we integrated with. So, you know, like Amazon and eBay and Etsy, and and they have, I don't know if they still do, I'm assuming they do, but at the time they had their own little like partner page, recommended partners of to use to different do different things. And we would invest a lot of energy into being a development partner with them. So we would go up to their conferences and give feedback on their APIs and different parts of their platforms and how it could be better based on our experience and and beta test things for them and so forth. And so we worked our way up into this, you know, gold status basically of these partners. Um, and that drove a lot of our customers early on. Um, we didn't have huge budgets to do any kind of paid marketing until a little bit later, paid search kind of marketing until a little bit later. Um, so a lot of it was word of mouth. Uh, and then we would attend some of the physical trade shows, the conferences. It was called re uh it was called IRCE at the time. I think it's now it's changed names a couple of times. It was Retail X, a big e-commerce conference here in the States. And um, so we would go to those and exhibit at those and talk to people in person. And um, so that was some of the early marketing. We eventually partnered with Shopify as they were starting to take off and and become huge. And so we were the first Shopify Plus partner that did any kind of integration like this, and and so then we had Shopify Plus salespeople recommending us or customer success people recommending us. So it was all about embracing our partners and doing what we could to um have them refer us and recommend us. We did a deal with eBay at the time, too, where there they had salespeople for different departments, and uh, as they were trying to build up their their B2B business, like their business uh sellers, I guess. Um, and so we had a uh an actual inked contract deal with them where they would recommend us and there was a commission structure and all these things. So um that was in the early days. I mean, the company was only six years old, but probably in the latter half, we were using um an agency, uh William Harris, actually, who introduced us. His agency element was helping us with some of our paid search at the time. And so we did eventually have some budget to be able to do some paid search and drive some traffic that way as well.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

I really love that story because, and this is going to sound controversial coming from a marketer, but I don't actually believe in big media budgets. I in B2B, it's all about relationships. So the fact that you mentioned partnerships, events, trade shows, you know, connecting with with all the right people in the industry. I think that's what that's what people need to do. I think that's what drives, and so many famous SaaS companies have done growth in that way. Um, one that I can think of at the top of my mind is HubSpot, for example. They started exclusively by by selling to partners only and having their partners sell to their clients. Um, and you know, look at them now, they've they've grown substantially. But um, yeah, no, I love that. I I think that's uh that's a good strategy.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

And I think it sort of depends on what type of customer you're going after, too. We were focused because the incumbents in the space were really more enterprise, we were focused on the SMB small, medium business market. So, and you know, our price point was lower and so forth. And so you got to look at what your customer acquisition costs are for the different marketing channels and what makes sense, right? Um, you can't, you know, you just have to do the math and figure out when what's the payback period, what's the lifetime value, can I afford to go get a customer through that channel? I honestly nowadays I don't know if we would have been able to afford Google Ads or Meta ads or anything because those costs are just so high right now. Um, but back in the day that was affordable.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Yeah, absolutely. They they've changed quite a bit for sure. Um, I started my career off in Google Ads, and I remember paying less than a dollar per click at the time. Um, and now you're like $60 per click? What?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Yeah. Right.

Book Outdoors And Selling To Non Tech

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Um then of course you had to pivot from SaaS into the world of outdoor travel and you went ahead and founded Book Outdoors. Tell us about that. That was shortly after leaving GoDaddy, or or did you take a break there?

SPEAKER_01 15:04

I took like a month break and then uh I jumped in. So my you know, some people personally for their careers, they just like get become experts in something and then just do that forever. I get bored. So I want to try something different, and I figured, okay, I want to build another company that is consumer focused. I still want to be in software and still want to be tech and you know, and e-commerce related, but focus on consumer. And so I actually the Book Outdoors was an online travel booking site for outdoor accommodation. So things like camping and I think you guys call them holiday parks and uh or caravan parks, right? RV parks, things like that. So I it wasn't actually my idea. I connected with some friends um that were kind of stewing on the idea and wanted a technical CEO co-founder. And so, excuse me, I joined them, um, like I said, but took about a month off and joined at the very beginning of Book Outdoors and launched it. Um, and and that one was a totally different story. That one we raised like five million dollars pre-seed out of the gate, partly based, mostly based on my co-founders um, who have much bigger exits and and successes than I did. Um, but all of us, I guess together, we were able to convince some investors to give us some money. And we went out and tried to build that company, um, which had its own challenges, right? There's a whole consumer side, totally different marketing, really, on that side of things. But you're trying to, we're essentially making a marketplace of all these um outdoor campgrounds and outdoor uh hospitality uh locations, and that had its own challenges, where some of these real small mom and pop type operations, I said I you know, I used to say they're allergic to tech, they didn't even use computers in their front office. You know, a lot of them still had like post-it notes on the back and that or a calendar, and they would write, and that's how they would take reservations. So trying to get them online and take online reservations for them was extremely difficult. And um, so we were able to get uh over a thousand campgrounds here in the states on board and working and you know and going, but we just weren't able to get to that next threshold really to be able to go out and take it to the next level. And so we ended up talking to really a competitor in the space called Hip Camp. They were doing inventory that was more Airbnb style, private land, private owners. We were doing more of the commercial campgrounds, the actual businesses that were campgrounds. So it made sense to bring that inventory together under their platform and just have it all. Um, and so that's what we end up doing is selling the company to them.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Yeah. It's um it's interesting because when when I work in well, I think this used to happen quite a lot, maybe not as much nowadays. I think people are a lot more tech savvy, you know, they've gone through the digital transformations and and you know, they're now immersing themselves in AI. But when I first started my career and I was helping B2B SaaS companies, their biggest competitor was Excel, um, or you know, post-it notes, like you said. And I think the job at the time was convincing their customers that what they were doing was a problem and there was a better way to do it. So they weren't actively looking for better ways to do it. We had to tell them there was better ways to do it. Um, was that your experience? How did you end up tackling that one with people that just weren't open to you know to easier ways?

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, definitely for a book outdoors. There, we talked about that all the time, that there was this huge education component to it. All of us for what 30 plus years now are used to doing that with hotels, going online, booking a hotel on Xpedia or booking.com, whatever. It's just easy and it's expected. Airbnb and Verbo did that for vacation rentals, and this was sort of the last piece of the hospitality space, so the campgrounds and the out, you know, the cabins and the outdoor space. The we the education was was a big part of it. We went to conferences that these campground owners go to to look at all types of vendors for different things. Um, but it was a big educational piece, and some of them just didn't want it, they just wanted to have a phone call and talk to every single customer. And but also they're working out shoveling snow on the campground or whatever. So a lot of times the phone's not even getting answered, and you know, we're we're telling them like we can fill your campground, and they'd rather have it half vacant than like pay for a booking. So, you know, sometimes you just can't get over that hurdle. And um, we were uh talk about timing again. In that space, at least here in the States, there's a lot of private equity buying up campgrounds and and rolling them up into real estate investment trusts and um or generational turnover where grandparents own it or even older parents own the campground, they're retiring, they don't really want to run it anymore. But sometimes the kids either run it and then they bring in tech, you know, grown kids, they're probably in their 30s or 40s, bring in tech at that point, or they sell it off to somebody who can bring it in. But I think we were probably just still too early, even though it's you know 10 and 15 years behind vacation rentals and like 30 years behind hotels, it's probably still too early on the campground side for most of us.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

Wow. Yeah, know your market, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Yeah, yeah, totally.

How To Prepare For Due Diligence

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Um, and then the last one, Darren and Bill. But before I get into that one, I'm just curious. But all the SAS founders listening to this podcast right now, and they're thinking about, I really want to sell, that's my goal. I want you know, acquisition to happen. What are the steps you go through? What are some of the tips you can give to someone to get themselves ready for that?

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Ooh, that's interesting. So, well, to get yourself ready, you want to have a very organized company to begin with. Because when you do get an offer and you go through due diligence, they are gonna ask for everything, every contract you've ever signed, every NDA, every everything, and they're gonna Want to look at your tech, all your files, all your financials. So you better organize now if you're not already organized. Put it on a shared drive somewhere, you know, and just like get yourself organized. Um, and then I would say, you know, start thinking about who could be potential acquirers. Why would a bigger company want your company? And can you start working with them early on? Most acquisitions happen because there's already a relationship in place, and there's you're already working with them in some some capacity, like we were with GoDaddy, and they get to know you, and you know, it's it's dating before marriage. Uh, sometimes it happens where they just come in and say, we want to buy it because whatever, and you know, they just write a big check. So should you be so lucky? But most of the time it happens because there's some kind of relationship. So, how can you start working with those bigger companies now? How do you partner? How do you get on their radar? Um, what can you do for them? What value can you bring to them? Um, sometimes it's just going on LinkedIn and finding the biz dev person at that bigger company and introducing yourself and tell them who you are and what you have to offer and everything. Just start opening doors as much as you can and partnering early. That's what I would recommend.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Yeah, really good advice there.

Buying A Brand Instead Of Starting Fresh

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Okay, the Australian Connection, Darren and Phillips, give us the story here. I feel like this is such a good business to kind of be in right now after you've gone through all of that um SAS journey and then going into that that challenge where um you know you're selling to an audience that's not ready to buy yet. Um, tell us what inspired Darren and Philip.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

So back to trying different things and getting bored with one thing. After we after Book Outdoors was done, I did not stay with Hip Camp who who purchased us. So I was sitting there with nothing to do, really. My wife, who's been in corporate e corporate HR for a long time, she had gotten laid off from her company, so she had nothing to do. We're sitting there looking at each other. What do we do? And um, we said, you know what, maybe we should buy a company rather than try to start one from scratch. You know, the the zero to one phase starting a company, I love it, but it's a ton of work and a ton of sacrifice, and I'm not any younger, and now I have kids. And so I said, what about if we buy something that already has some momentum that we feel like we can use our experience to scale and have fun doing that? And so we looked at everything. We looked at buying companies that um were like local landscaping businesses or HVAC, you know, local like service companies that were a little more boring but kind of already going and didn't require much work. Um, but probably the biggest mistake I made was not listening to my wife and deciding to do something more fun because it's also much harder. Um, so we ended up uh getting in touch with the founders of Darren and Philip. Like you said, Darren and Phillip is a premium lifestyle brand for dog people. So we make apparel and accessories for dog people and their dogs, matching coordinated outfits and accessories. Um we found uh the founders of of Darren and Phillip who were in Melbourne, Australia, where the company was started, and had gone through their own, you know, life changes, had kids as well, and had been running the business for a few years and didn't really know how to expand it to the US. They had they had already, they were selling in the US, but didn't really know how to take it to the next level from Australia. So um they were looking for, they just didn't want to sell to anybody. They were looking for a special buyer, I guess. And they're a husband and wife team, and my wife and I were looking, so it was a good match. We had them come out from Australia, they stayed with us, we got to know them, and seemed like a good business um with good metrics and a good community, most importantly, and repeat customer rate. And um, and so we we bought the business from them and took it over, and they stayed on for about six months to help us transition and learn the process. But it was on Shopify already, and you know, it all the tech that I already knew was there, so that was helpful and just sort of getting ramped up on all that. Um but so it's been a fun journey, but a difficult one because well, first of all, just a direct-to-consumer apparel brand is hard, and inventory management and cash management is hard, and we're we've you know we don't have investors on this, we did this ourselves, and so we're managing that and managing not only human sizes but dog sizes and inventory levels and all very different than tech. And most people do this first and think and realize this is so hard, then that they go back to software. For some reason, I'm crazy and went the other way around. They all go back to tech eventually, but um, but it's been fun and it's fun to have a physical product to sell. You know, I've always just sold software or bookings or whatever, so you know it's fun to have a physical product, but it is really hard. And one of the things we underestimated was the importance of the founder and her dogs. Darren and Philip were her dogs. And the the her dogs had a internet presence and an Instagram presence, and much of the community and following was around that and her. And once those are both her dogs, sadly passed away, and but she was sort of still the face of it. But when she was gone, it was really hard for us to we can't just copy her, right? It was really hard for us to continue that on. We do still have loyal customers, um, still something from Australia, a lot in the US. It shifted more now to the US, um, and also in the UK and Europe as well and Canada. Um, but it's just been difficult to do that transition. Um, and so we've decided to reposition the brand a little bit on the types of products we want to sell and just to make it a little bit more our own rather than just trying to what we learned was trying to copy what she was doing wasn't gonna work because we weren't her and we didn't have those dogs, and it just wasn't gonna work. So um that's been the difficult transition for it, but we're still uh you know growing company and still have a great opportunity to grow it, and we're excited about it.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Yeah, it sounds like a completely different set of problems that you had to learn how to solve, which should have been totally exciting enough to get you out of that boredom, I suppose. Um yeah, it's it's it feels so good when you learn how to solve them. Um I'm a dog person. You may have heard mine barking in the background already. So um completely uh appreciate what you're doing. I think it's

Australia To US Expansion Basics

SPEAKER_00 29:12

amazing. You did mention expansion into the US, which is, I think, one of the hardest things Australian companies never quite learn how to do. Um, so for all of our Australian companies listening at the moment, I'm wondering if you can give us any advice. I mean, I always feel like you have to connect and partner with someone on the ground. You can't really learn how to speak that same language, even though it's English. Um, so what are some advice for expansion into the US?

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Well, you know, there's you have a couple of things that are difficult. The time zone difference is difficult, right? There's only a few hours of awake overlap. It's evening for me and it's early morning for you right now. Um but you're right, having having somebody here. So what they did, actually, to their credit, is they started using a third-party logistics company to do fulfillment. And that company had locations in both Australia and the US. And so, because a big part of it, if you're shipping product, a big part is no American, unless you really, really need to have this thing, but like shipping from Australia to the US is probably the most expensive route there is and most and it takes the longest. And so you kind of have to have a location and inventory here. We still have inventory and a location in Australia, actually, and and the US, so we maintain that. Um, but that just it adds complexity because now you got to figure out inventory for both locations, but it also helps you expand in the US. Um, I think you know, she the the founder was running Facebook ads here in the US. And I don't, you know, I think the Australian accent is novelty here for Americans, and so probably catches your attention more when you're scrolling to see to see that. But um, but it also might be uh it might be difficult because I think many Americans would say, Oh, it's a that's a company in Australia, so it doesn't like pertain to me, or you know, uh unless they have a location here, they ship here or whatever. So um, but yeah, I think that's the first thing is maybe getting inventory here and being able to ship from here.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

Yeah. And from a marketing point of view, are you finding maybe like connecting with dog influencers or running more Facebook ads, or we should call it Meta now? I'll never get used to that. Um what's kind of the strategy

Repositioning Marketing And Influencers

SPEAKER_00 31:45

there? What's what are you finding works well?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

So it's really interesting because we part of this repositioning is to really make the brand and the product primarily for dog people and the dog products as secondary. So when we bought it, it was more of a pet brand where the human clothes was an afterthought if you want to match your dog. We're now trying to position this as this is a lifestyle brand, just like there's golf lifestyle brands or yoga or you know, you name it, whatever activity or lifestyle that you're involved in, there's a brand for it. We're trying to do that where the dog is the lifestyle. And so we're making clothes for humans prime first, and your dog can match you. So it's uh flipping that, but it's sort of a subtle thing, but it repositions who we're going after and what we're trying to do. So our community and what we purchased was uh um a lot of dog account influencers, so it dog Instagram accounts with no no people in them, just dogs. So um those are still successful, and we still work with some of those, but we're trying to find and work with more um content creators that are human first, have human first accounts where their dog is in it sometimes or all the time, or you know, part of their lifestyle. But um our product could stand alone as a human product only and not have the matching piece if you need to.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Yeah, that's really interesting. I that would work really well. And I just keep something that keeps coming to my mind is you always you know that expression where you say that the dogs look like their owners, even without the clothes matching. I always see it on people. It's so true, and so um, I just think it would be so amazing just to match with your dog. Um I love that.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

Our biggest seller is right now is uh you can kind of see some of the ones back here in these bags, but we have these really plush, soft, super soft robes, dressing gowns, they're called sometimes, um, bathrobes. And so for mostly for women, we have some dark blue and tan ones for men too. We that buy it, but um they're super luxurious, comfortable bathrobes. And then we make a matching one for the dog, but the dog one has a functional component too, because it has straps that wrap around and create like this swaddle kind of hugging effect that calms dogs down. So it feels like a blanket. Yeah, and a lot of dogs like to bury in a blanket to, you know, when they're anxious, and this creates this like hugging effect. And we've had so many customers talk about how it calms their dogs when you know, separation anxiety, fireworks, lightning, things like that. Um, so those are our top sellers, and um, you know, we introduced we have hoodies and t-shirts and nice dog walking, crossbody dog walking bags and things like that as well. Um, but those are our best sellers.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Yeah.

Career Advice For Kids In AI

SPEAKER_00 34:54

You mentioned you're also a girl. How many girls do you have?

SPEAKER_01 34:59

One human girl. I have one daughter um who's 10 years old, but we have a lot of animals in our house, and most of them are female uh cats and dogs and and so forth. So uh my wife. So I'm outnumbered in our household, but we have one 10-year-old daughter. Yeah, she's uh she's amazing. It's a great age.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

And so, like, given your entrepreneurial journey and everything you've been through, say your daughter asks, Dad, you know, what career advice can you give me? You know, especially with AI, I think a lot of people and a lot of um, I think it's generation alpha now, because I've got an 11-year-old. Um, they're sort of thinking, well, what can we do? Like, what career choices are we gonna have? They're already thinking about some of these um, you know, challenges they're gonna have. So, say she comes to you and says, What should I pursue? What advice would you give her?

SPEAKER_01 35:54

She's followed along my entrepreneurial journey from the since she was tiny. She would come to our office and she sees me working constantly from the kitchen table or from the office or whatever. Um, so I would actually encourage her to be entrepreneurial as well and try to um work on something that she's interested in or solve a problem that she's seeing you know in her own life or her friends or whatever. I really would try to push her the entrepreneurial route because I think we're always going to need business people, we're always gonna need businesses and AI. I mean, we use AI a ton in Darren and Philip right now for for all different things, and it makes a lot of things easier. Um, and she has definitely learned how to use Chat GPT and all those things as well. So I think from a skill set like staying on top of technology and um understanding what the latest technology is, because as you get through school and into the real world, you want to be caught up and you want to know, you know, be able to use the latest tools and and um and be relevant and be able to write who I don't know. In 10 years from now, we might not be writing prompts, it might be different, but um it's just moving so fast. But staying on top of that, um, I think is important. But yeah, you know, it's hard to say even in 10 years what entry-level jobs will exist and which ones won't. So I would say, you know, stay entrepreneurial and think about what businesses you or products you can create.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

I agree. I think entrepreneurial um mindset and you know, having more entrepreneurs because uh I don't know about the US, but in Australia, um, you know, the the small businesses are the ones that employ the majority of the population, not the bigger ones. So it's actually really important to maintain that entrepreneurial mindset and you know put out little entrepreneurs into the world.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

And if I think back to um when I first started my career, the jobs that I had, my parents wouldn't have had a clue they would exist, you know, back in back when they were my age. So um I think it's quite normal. I remember when I first started a career in marketing and I was running Google Ads for clients, my parents used to tell their friends, oh, she works at Google. Um, which was not true, but that's all they knew.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

I started my career in the late 90s, so web internet and websites were just getting going. I built a lot of websites, first-time websites for companies back in the day. And trying to explain to my mom what a website was was like she didn't get it, you know.

unknown 38:42

No.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Come a long way since then.

Think Bigger And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 38:46

Yes. Um, Brian, my last question to you a bit of a tradition on this uh podcast is if you could go back in time and give advice to your younger self, what would it be and at what age would you do it?

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Ooh, very good question. I would probably because of that timing that I just mentioned and coming out of school in the late 90s when the internet was really just getting going. My advice to myself, so write it, call it 20 years old, would be think bigger. I had a very small world mindset back in the day when I was building websites for other small local companies. And I had built an e-commerce platform, basically, that um for you know small little like boutique shops. And um the the first website ever made that could sell anything was for a surf shop, surfboard shop and where I lived. And I did it in exchange for a surfboard, but I was thinking small, right? And I had this platform that I built that it was reusable and I could go take it and use it again for other companies. And I didn't have the mindset that that could have been like Shopify back in the day, right? I didn't think like this could be how do I build this to scale and to be way bigger, to be global, rather than just using it for little companies. So if I could go back to my 20s, I mean I think I talk about timing, like that was the the time to build something platform, you know, first generation internet stuff that turned a lot of people into billionaires. And uh I wish I just thought bigger. I wish I thought bigger.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

I love ending on that advice. Dream big for everyone. I think we're all guilty of um not doing it. So um yeah, it it's it's not as easy as it sounds, but it it it's nice to be able to do it.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

It is. It's hard to think as an individual person out of eight billion people on this planet that you can have an effect on everybody or almost everybody by building something that large.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

It's some people are just wired that way, but most people don't think that way.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for being on the show. I love all of that advice. Uh yeah, thanks Joe having you.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

This has been great. Love these conversations. Thanks, Joe.